Pipelines serving as an important part of the national lifeline engineering are of the major artery of national energy sources, and its safe operation has a major impact on the national economic development. In order to ensure the safety of the pipelines, it is necessary to detect the pipelines after they have been operating for a period of time, so as to find safety hazards in time.
A pipeline robot functions as a main driving device for realizing pipeline detection. The pipeline robot that carries detection equipment crawls along a pipeline to complete the pipeline detection work. With the continuous scale development of oil and gas and water supply pipelines in China, the structure of pipeline networks is becoming more and more complex. In particular, there are a large number of branch pipelines in urban gas and water supply pipeline networks. Therefore, in order to achieve comprehensive detection of the pipeline networks, the pipeline robot must be able to actively and flexibly steer and perform detection according to the set pipeline lines. In the patents 2007100500568 and 2012104818937, a body which adopts an overall design has poor cornering capability and can crawl along a single pipe path with a larger turning radius only. In the patent 2015107317708 in which movement nipples are connected by a universal joint, and in the patent 2015108488450 in which a main support and a drive motor support that are connected flexibly, passive steering along a pipeline is implemented, such that the cornering capability is improved; however, because these connections belong to passive steering connections, it is still possible to crawl only along a single pipe path and active steering within a multi-branch pipeline network cannot be achieved. Through investigation and analysis, it is found that most of the existing pipeline robots are passively steered, such that they fail to actively steer in case of encountering branch pipelines, and thus cannot meet the testing requirements of complex branch pipeline networks.
Therefore, a pipeline robot capable of implementing active steering is designed and invented against the defects of the existing pipeline robot, which has a positive significance for the detection of complex multi-branch pipeline networks.